One way or another, all employees are managed. But approaches to managing employees varying from employee-to-employee, job-to-job, manager-to-manager, organization-to-organization, and country-to-country. This course provides a foundation for developing your own approach to skillfully managing employees by illustrating alternative human resource management (HRM) strategies, introducing the importance of the legal context, and thinking about what motivates employees. This will then give you the factual and conceptual basis for developing specific, critical HRM skills in subsequent courses on hiring employees, managing performance, and rewarding employees. Don't know anything about HRM? That's OK! Leave this course with a new-found understanding of the range of options available for managing employees, a grasp of what makes workers tick, and the readiness to develop your own HRM skills.

From the lesson

The People Manager as Part of a Complex System

Welcome to the fourth and final module of this course! In this section, we'll finish laying a foundation for managing human resources by looking at the constraints faced by managers, especially the legal environment. After completing this module, you will be able to… • Explain at least four constraints that influence how human resources are managed in a particular organization. • Compare the ways in which the law does and does not see employment as a typical contractual relationship. • Create a list of legal and illegal HRM practices in your country. • Judge when to use strategies for managing people that go beyond what the law requires.